The present invention relates generally to the field of software design, and more particularly to authenticating source code of a software product.
A typical life-cycle of software includes delivering the package to the customer as an installer pack and then delivering fix packs to the customer. Fix packs often include the bug fixes and other feature enhancements. Fix packs refer to a set of files, which have been altered from the base product that was given to the customer. Often, multiple fix packs are delivered for the same product, over a period of time.
Normal procedures of building fix packs and software products involve extracting the files from a central repository or multiple repositories, and building it on the applicable platforms on a build environment customized for the software. In addition to standard fix packs, there can also be customized fixes that get built and delivered to meet the specific needs of a particular customer. The complexity of the build process varies across software and it may be a common scenario to extract thousands of files for building the fix packs in larger software.